Context information supports serial dependence of multiple visual objects across memory episodes

Fischer, Cora; Czoschke, Stefan; Peters, Benjamin; Rahm, Benjamin; Kaiser, Jochen; Bledowski, Christoph

doi:10.1038/s41467-020-15874-w

Cited by 68 publications

(66 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Taken together, our results point to an interesting interaction between relevance of prior choices and other aspects of the prior stimuli and actions for serial dependence: that is, choice relevance is key in generating serial dependence, which is then modulated by low-level stimulus similarity and motor execution. This is in line with another recent study that showed stronger serial dependence when contextual features were the same across trials 48 .…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

Perceptual decisions are biased toward relevant prior choices

Feigin

Baror

Bar

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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Perceptual decisions are biased by recent perceptual history—a phenomenon termed 'serial dependence.' Here, we investigated what aspects of perceptual decisions lead to serial dependence, and disambiguated the influences of low-level sensory information, prior choices and motor actions. Participants discriminated whether a brief visual stimulus lay to left/right of the screen center. Following a series of biased ‘prior’ location discriminations, subsequent ‘test’ location discriminations were biased toward the prior choices, even when these were reported via different motor actions (using different keys), and when the prior and test stimuli differed in color. By contrast, prior discriminations about an irrelevant stimulus feature (color) did not substantially influence subsequent location discriminations, even though these were reported via the same motor actions. Additionally, when color (not location) was discriminated, a bias in prior stimulus locations no longer influenced subsequent location discriminations. Although low-level stimuli and motor actions did not trigger serial-dependence on their own, similarity of these features across discriminations boosted the effect. These findings suggest that relevance across perceptual decisions is a key factor for serial dependence. Accordingly, serial dependence likely reflects a high-level mechanism by which the brain predicts and interprets new incoming sensory information in accordance with relevant prior choices.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

Perceptual decisions are biased toward relevant prior choices

Feigin

Baror

Bar

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Obviously, this does not exclude the role of other factors, like attention 10 , 29 and confidence, 30 , 31 , 32 or processes such as short-term memory. 16 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 How these interact with the early mechanisms revealed in this study remains open, subject to further research.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Perceptual history propagates down to early levels of sensory analysis

2021

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Summary One function of perceptual systems is to construct and maintain a reliable representation of the environment. A useful strategy intrinsic to modern “Bayesian” theories of perception 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 is to take advantage of the relative stability of the input and use perceptual history (priors) to predict current perception. This strategy is efficient 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 but can lead to stimuli being biased toward perceptual history, clearly revealed in a phenomenon known as serial dependence. 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 However, it is still unclear whether serial dependence biases sensory encoding or only perceptual decisions. 15 , 16 We leveraged on the “surround tilt illusion”—where tilted flanking stimuli strongly bias perceived orientation—to measure its influence on the pattern of serial dependence, which is typically maximal for similar orientations of past and present stimuli. 7 , 10 Maximal serial dependence for a neutral stimulus preceded by an illusory one occurred when the perceived, not the physical, orientations of the two stimuli matched, suggesting that the priors biasing current perception incorporate the effect of the illusion. However, maximal serial dependence of illusory stimuli induced by neutral stimuli occurred when their physical (not perceived) orientations were matched, suggesting that priors interact with incoming sensory signals before they are biased by flanking stimuli. The evidence suggests that priors are high-level constructs incorporating contextual information, which interact directly with early sensory signals, not with highly processed perceptual representations.

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“…Fischer & Whitney, 2014;Manassi, Liberman, Chaney, & Whitney, 2017;Manassi, Kristjánsson, & Whitney, 2019;Pascucci et al, 2019). Contextual information supports the integration of the recent past and present in order to enable stable percepts across time (C. Fischer et al, 2020). Critically, these recent experiences do not simply alter but can also facilitate perception (Cicchini, Mikellidou, & Burr, 2018).…”

Section: The Recent Past Supports Attention and Working Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Keeping it real: Looking beyond capacity limits in visual cognition

Kristjánsson

Draschkow

2021

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Research within visual cognition has made tremendous strides in uncovering the basic operating characteristics of the visual system by reducing the complexity of natural vision to artificial but well-controlled experimental tasks and stimuli. This reductionist approach has for example been used to assess the basic limitations of visual attention, visual working memory (VWM) capacity, and the fidelity of visual long-term memory (VLTM). The assessment of these limits is usually made in a pure sense, irrespective of goals, actions, and priors. While it is important to map out the bottlenecks our visual system faces, we focus here on selected examples of how such limitations can be overcome. Recent findings suggest that during more natural tasks, capacity may be higher than reductionist research suggests and that separable systems subserve different actions, such as reaching and looking, which might provide important insights about how pure attentional or memory limitations could be circumvented. We also review evidence suggesting that the closer we get to naturalistic behavior, the more we encounter implicit learning mechanisms that operate “for free” and “on the fly.” These mechanisms provide a surprisingly rich visual experience, which can support capacity-limited systems. We speculate whether natural tasks may yield different estimates of the limitations of VWM, VLTM, and attention, and propose that capacity measurements should also pass the real-world test within naturalistic frameworks. Our review highlights various approaches for this and suggests that our understanding of visual cognition will benefit from incorporating the complexities of real-world cognition in experimental approaches.

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Context information supports serial dependence of multiple visual objects across memory episodes

Cited by 68 publications

References 42 publications

Perceptual decisions are biased toward relevant prior choices

Perceptual decisions are biased toward relevant prior choices

Perceptual history propagates down to early levels of sensory analysis

Keeping it real: Looking beyond capacity limits in visual cognition

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